The Internet will hit a major milestone of 100 million “hostnames” before the end of September, web hosting analysis company Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) reported recently. According to Netcraft, 96,854,877 hostnames made up the Internet at the beginning of September. With 4.2 million hostnames joining the Internet in August, all bets are on for 100 million before the end of the month.

The growth of the Internet has indeed been explosive. The first five months of this year saw 2.75 million new hostnames added to the Internet every month. Since June, that average has almost doubled to 5.4 million.

One of the main reasons for this growth, according to Netcraft, is the growth in popularity in Google's and Microsoft's blogging services. Windows Live Spaces added 1.3 million hostnames over the past month and Google gained about 459,000. The situation has impacted web server market shares with Microsoft gains giving them around 30% of the market and Apache around 60%.